I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant.

This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.

What should come to mind when communism comes up then?

Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.

I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.

A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:

- People actually living and working in communes.

- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).

- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.

I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.

Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or it is not communism...

For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".

I suspect there was a sneaky edit between the time of my reply and the time you read it.

Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes a huge difference.

Leaving is often quite difficult because it means losing benefits and there are often not better alternatives.

Playing devils advocate here - how this is inherent to communism? I would rather guess that this is emerged behaviour of any human system that is facing collapse and has no preventions build in.

I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).

Walls like health insurance and references?